Category Archives: Metaphor

Dirt-slicked sleeves with all places to be, the sun shining furiously.

Furiously.

A Chrysanthemum in my teeth, the bit of the horse and my spit-shined teeth are going out to bore in to this town. One brown, the other yellow leopard, pants frayed and stained spectacles for sight.

All people a graveyard, all silence, all night.

When the sun goes down, the little lepers climb over their mother’s bosom, they come screaming like freight trains through kegs, chewing on graphite chicken legs lookin’ to reach a bottom. I just smile and flick cigarettes, the glare of the sun all over these brand new marionettes with their truncheons in my cheeks, flecks of dirty dirt in their shadows.

“Look around, son. What do you see?”

I paused and glanced, “Nothing.”

He shook his head, tipped his hat, and that seemed to be that.

In the forest, every tree my rifle, every fire is mine and to be mine there must be a recital; let those shots go in every direction. Just make sure they find the one that’s up there looking down on us, seconding our guessing.

O, by the bayou, wavering banner, take me in your arms and explain how nothing’s not ever the matter and I’ll swing for the stars and shake the hornets, grab onto slivers and shimmy down bitter – there’s no cold season when your pneumonia’s pneumonic but I’ll give you a taste of a caliber days and we can just pray and pretend that it’s clay and that we are not it but of it and we might allow ourselves to be molded and told of the covenant.

If not, so be it, a thousand tons of satin inside my valves and the car drives but it is very loud and all these people are making a raucous and I don’t know if they took the liquor off my shelf or if the liquor got up and walked out.

Bye the bayou, O glamor, O fame, take this Chrysanthemum from me and let it not take away your days.

The somnolence of a cathedral encircled in coal-blackened doves and the howling of the wind above could be the only thing that persisted in a man’s being. The only thing a man could hear beyond the retched tune of the infallibility of a diseased world. There will be no deliverance, the golden scrolls and pythagorus and his minions all dancing hysterically, missing second red buttons on the collars of their tunics, stained with blood and grime. The odor of the ground and the heartily giggling sky mingling like inbred felines. There is a danger in this place, walking like this on this city like Thor. There is a fever in all of this that will produce no more than a storm that would devour the earth and hawk out its lungs histrionically.

To live one must die and to die one must sacrifice; the ancients and the gods and the devils and the angels all in one massive orgy of sweet surrender to the soaring winds of never.

“…the old man would ever have.” Almost arching his prepubescent back up toward the ceilinged sky, the child breathed in Hemingway’s finale. “Get back to the Abacus. Now, Charles.” He glanced sidelong at the horrid teal wall with the crooked spines of the books. “I’m just putting away my ultimate division scenario arithmetic, Ms. Apple.” He had adjusted the room so that he might read a short story, here Hemingway, over by String Theory, Ezekiel, by addition/substraction he kept the Koran.

The Abacus was a wretched teal bubble stick with which Charlie never would have been exposed despite his extreme calculative abilities, which he could perform in his heart, if not for his father and his mother’s docility toward his father’s hatred for art. “The only art you’ll ever have boy, is the art of selling paint for cash.” It was a wretched time to be alive. It always was. He imagined himself languishing in the desert outside Cairo building pyramids and tombs with massive rock and—. “Back to work.” The Abacus slid into his hand like a snake and he gazed at it lovingly for the sake of Ms. Apple.

He took the Abacus to his corner of the nearly shrill room full of the pain of children being forced out of art into death. As was customary for him and Abacus Hour he turned inward and faced the corner that was his that day at the Academy for the Righteous Arts and Splendors. “Georgina, I need your string theory proposal in two and a half minutes, you’ve had three days by golly!”

He gingerly worked the Abacus with his small, nimble fingers and pried it in half so that a small Papyrus scroll rolled tight fell into his torso. He unrolled the ten foot document about seven inches and his fingers hurt and he knew what arthritis was and he glanced at that horrible wall covering the heavens and asked why, again. “The Beauty and Solace of Man Lie in The Struggle to Achieve the Freedom of Paranoia from The Reality of The Beasts of Servitude…”

Ms. Apple was staring into his physical cave where he was reading his scroll that he had created based on the diseased ideas the Academy suggested he was experiencing due to a strong and difficult to pry open codependency with his mother and the world above the teal. They suggested aversion therapy based on Pavlovian and B.F. Skinner models.

“No.” He knew he would be forced to burn it himself. He had worked on the transcription from only his mind in the fashion of Dumas forever.

“Bring in the slavery bucket!”

All the children immediately turned inward, angst, pain, and humorous sadness on their faces apparent as the color of their scorched eyes. Charlie moved to the middle of the chamber.

Like this:

Magnetic metallurgy will pull you through my script like gale wind and tidal currents in my current titles, it’s not idolatry to believe that me could be making you flee; back and forth like an exorcism, indeed.

Well, let’s see.

Ten years and slot machine change without change and now I changed; sobered the fuck up somehow but I’d be illuminated greatly if I could see you face the things that have passed directly under my eyebrows without immediately stroking out.

Let’s not be melodramatic, Alex. This is illustrative of the illustration of integer’s of integrity and all the nights in the streets and all the other nights in the sheets, my nose burnt out like a bulb – unable to sleep. Feels like red roses that stick you every single fucking time you hold them, apparently someone higher up in the management decided I had the time. I deliberated and watched the clock but I always knew I’d be writing instead of inhaling lines.

Like the betrayal of a titan for flame, prometheus had the brass balls and look what happened to him, it’s kind of like the OJ trial plus the paradoxical reality of his ass pulling armed robbery after Cochran passed on blazing cameras in vegas, makes no sense, like eggs and licorice for breakfast.

Spoken. Licorice black as a Chevron ocean will twist your arm until you writhe and scream, the blood pulling and pooling in your mouth but you think you remain similar – there are no resemblances that I can tell but you feel free to imply whatever you like.

Pull you like whipped horses in a carriage.

Pull you apart – twin children concurrent of the divorce – their parents.

Pull you apart like Muhammed, think the Sunni & Shia gunmen.

Pull you apart like blood and your skin during a facelift on more twins.

This is loyalty to the cause I’ve endured. Ninety nine problems of my own and I own them all far, far too long, the lease with a fucked up rate that can’t be stalled like the car itself I’m driving which I hope crashes into all walls.

At least I did before I smelled this bourbon colored flower yesterday.

Like a Nazi scientist with a good heart; conflicted but about his business inserting typhus and syphilis to study the art of zombie making whilst drinking fine wine before the allies started invading, listening to Chopin or Brahms or even Beethoven with a family he loved once upon a time before he knew his heart to be as black as volcanic ash colored mud. He used one bullet from one gun; before he did it he inscribed the initials of the people he hurt on the bullet and now he’s floating somewhere between purgatory and hell.

Oh, well.

Roses are red and violets are blue, I guess.

At least that’s what they say… now, could you resign yourself to my fate?

Like this:

The nose of a 747 into my forehead for beauty, the heavens, high up above all of this, high up above my culpabilities, above everything and nothing. I see mostly black with some shadows; I go up at night, laying in my golden sarcophagus during daylight, grinding my bones, chiseling out my skin.

The string doesn’t have a color, not one that I can recollect, just a feeling, a touch softer than the petals of tulips, harder than granite and mortar fire. The threads around my neck to hold me in place and my shallow breath.

A noose hanging from clouds, a view of eventual throes of pain, insanity and doubt. But the taste of the air, it’s like levitating over the cauldron of a smokestack that tastes like raspberries, the pleasure and the pain you can and must have up there.

Yes a noose from the clouds, soaked in frigid rain yet I remain to feel the alleviation of one microgram of my pain.

The rope hanging down like the umbilical cord of the mother of war and I am the son, the prodigal child caged and tattooed, sharp blood ink emblazoned on everything I’ve ever tried to do. No, the string hangs forever like an immortal balloon waiting still, coiled just for me and you.

I’ve been here before, my throat raw, my legs broken and mangled, screaming the star spangled at anyone who would take it away.

The string must be given away and the clouds must float away, be given away like candy to children by men in dark vans.

I turned away and looked and what I saw made my eyes drip and my muscles shake, this is the end of the line if you believe in fate.

Like this:

The pendulum of the sun stolen from the ground to vanish back into the dirt of the earth that’s where our aloneness begins, our terror of having and not having ourselves the sun’s abandonment of us every day of our lives evasively slips away like it wasn’t ever there at all

The moon rises to fill the gaping abyss that is the sky when the sun no longer burns the desiccated, glowing moon, injured and broken, showing us our fragile reflection dark holes that lie beneath the moonshine, a pockmarked face, a pained face a face we know when we examine ourselves because it is like our pained face the sun’s violent, hysterical burning, us desperate for its wonderful agony leaving us melanoma to take from us our skins and lives but leaving warmth the moon is harmless and beautiful alone and ugly, like us but without the light given by sun’s burn we die, because we cannot see each other

icarus flew too close to the son again
and illumination shamelessly burned him like syphilis

with a kiss
from the heavens’ misted baptismal eclipse

the dramatist, the tragedian, the blind and bound prophet
recording reorderings, hapless with a snake for a toothbrush
or a tongue
Sophocles’
idiot sun

and as he grasped at the falling, fallen icarus,
he could not discern between the stars & the dust
that rose from the terra from which icarus was thrust
and he still grasping up, clutching grass blades
thinking “breaking harps may stop breaking hearts”

exhume a plague from a mind-field of sharp, rolling rocks
have a new burial inside his own personal graveyard
rearranging the remaining ghosts all laying charred
on the floor of the house he built from scars
with a tiny window from where he could not
see the stars

beloved rain please wash me
no one is watching

in the mud, sobbing with grief, relentlessly not free
caught in a forest of poppies smiling at me
as i try not to be

but i am
harbinger of pain as i try to heal i am mauled
by flippant, sick little
nothings
and and and my brain boils
my blood tinted with lives as it tries to dry on the soil

i must make the devil recoil
i must make god feel like black gasoline
i myself feel everything
too
bad
drowning in a pool of bloody, shattered wedding rings